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Every day I go through a ritual on my drive home, I clear out my voicemails. Yesterday was a typical day with 36 voicemails.

11 messages from people wanting to know if I need insurance, etc.

10 messages pitching services and products that are not relevant to my business

7 Robo-call messages that were undecipherable

4 messages from people reading a script at breakneck speed

2 messages from clients

1 message from a firm looking to a explore partnership

1 message from a client telling me about a referral they’re making

My thumb is so well trained to hit *6 delete on my cellphone that it is stands at the ready for every voicemail which gets less than 5 seconds before its fate is decided.

I’d like to give every caller the benefit of the doubt because I too sell services and know how hard it is to reach prospects. After averaging 20 calls a day from vendors who clearly have no idea what we do or care if their service/product is appropriate for us, I’ve become pretty ruthless with the delete key.

Turns out I’m not alone. In a poll of our clients about how they use their phones, the overwhelming response was “desk phones are for outbound calls only. Cellphones are for inbound calls. Need to get a hold of me urgently, use IM.”

Needless to say getting their cellphone and IM name only comes after some level of trust has been built. The death of the desk phone is rooted in the daily voicemail clutter as well as the fear of accidentally talking to one of these callers. Turns out that “No, I’m not interested” doesn’t discourage and politely telling the caller you don’t fit their target account profile seems to only spur them on. Years ago I had a salesperson from Marcus Evans, one of those “exclusive” business executive event companies, tell me that I was stupid for not buying his service and that he was calling my boss. The funny part is that I am the boss.

As anyone who is in sales or runs a company knows, reaching target prospects is tough. In response to unanswered phone calls, B2B companies’ have a two-fold strategy: Become a customer-obsessed organization and adopt social selling. It does bear pointing out that every company should be customer-obsessed. It’s not a new concept having been around since the time we traded in temples and fields.

The desk phone’s demise began when we went overboard using technology to replace one-to-one relationship building with one-to-many communications. Daily cold call quotas and “spray and pray” marketing replaced that crucial credibility establishing face-to-face meeting where one learned about the prospect’s business and built a meaningful relationship. Granted the economy has grown exponentially and doing business globally has never been easier as a result of technology but in the process we created today’s elusive buyer. By bombarding them we replaced sharing valuable information with a cacophony of noise. Buyers, in turn, used technology to effectively shut us out.

Social selling is now being billed as the new way to engage the elusive buyer. That is only true if your target buyer is active on social media and not all social media channels are equal in the eyes of buyers. Some buyers are more open to Twitter messages than InMail while others engage more in social communities and blogs. Social selling doesn’t relieve Marketing and Sales from doing their homework. They still need to research the buyer’s social behaviors, what topics engage them, and if your product is even relevant before crafting that pity 140-character message.

Social selling can go the way of the phone if we aren’t careful. Its fate however depends on how sales and marketing view the role of social. If it is seen as just another channel to push messages out, don’t expect a different outcome.

Interestingly in today’s uber-connected, always-on business environment the oldest form of selling – relationship building - remains the most effective. Done correctly social selling can be an effective platform for customer-engagement if we embrace the tradition of building value-based one-to-one relationships. Then the outcome can be very rewarding for both the buyer and the seller.